Manifest Destiny

by Allen Ivers

  This was so much colder than that.

  The aluminum hull of the Murcielago seemed to have fangs all its own, nipping at him with each and every finger hold. It bit down through his fingers and up his arms until he could feel his heart pushing the cold ever deeper, down his legs and up his back.

  It had taken several minutes for it all to set in, as the equilibrium of a solar vacuum chilled right through to his ribs and spine.

  Would a jacket help ward off the unforgiving black? A pair of hand sewn gloves, lined with wool and careful love? Or would they simply interfere with the work to be done?

  For the first ten or so minutes, it felt like any other spacewalk. But slowly the cold slipped its fingers and around his bones, tightening and pulling on every splinter. He hardly remembered a time when he was warm, even as the sun scorched its white gaze upon his neck.

  You don’t have to worry about any of that, though. You’re safe.

  Leo pulled himself hand over hand, like he’d done almost a hundred times. It struck him how odd it felt not being able to feel, his fingers too numb to feel the biting cold of the Murci’s hull anymore. It was more distant memory now, his mind sounding an instinctual alarm somewhere back in his reptile origins.

  This wasn’t right. This was dangerous. This would kill him.

  You’re safe.

  Leo had been holding his breath for quite a few minutes now, and hadn’t yet tired. He had been bare skin to the vacuum of space. Every ounce of his training bellowed commands to return to safe harbor.

  He should’ve been dead by now. His blood frozen and boiled all at the same time, as his lungs ruptured and crystallized into a bloated horror that might one day streak across a midnight sky, just one more piece of solar debris. Insignificant, lifeless, meaningless.

  But that constant refrain in the back of his mind: you’re safe.

  How?

  The sun seemed to throb overhead, waves of white light beating against him with a warm summer rain. It was a kind of soft comfort that Leo was certain would give him cancer. There was no way this much unfiltered cosmic radiation was good for him, and no amount of Talcyon tablets would protect him.

  But open space and that brilliant searing glow didn’t feel that threatening today. Maybe his priorities had shifted, or maybe this was just what it felt like to die, as simple cares melted away to reveal singular purpose.

  The transmitter assembly was just ahead, a solitary spire reaching out from the back of the Murci, a single hornet’s stinger pointed away from the abdomen. From there he should be able to access the radio systems primarily and get his message out to the cosmos.

  Nothing with any real sophistication -- probably just a data burst in Morse code or the like, something simple. But enough to indicate that not all is well, help is required, and all that. Once Piotr and the others found out what he was doing, they’d almost certainly try to retract the antenna.

  Try to silence you. There has to be a way to prevent that from happening.

  It was remarkably simple work. There was something very pleasant about working with a screw gun and loosening bolts after everything that had happened.

  It was a calm reminder of simpler times. This was something he understood deep in his blood. Like a song you remember from childhood, still humming the tune well into your golden years, long after you’ve forgotten the words. It brought warmth to the veins long after all other connotations had passed into antiquity, no other import than that surge of happiness that danced along with that most meaningful melody.

  This is what it was to be happy again. Don’t you enjoy how that feels?

  The fourth bolt came loose like it never wanted to be there in the first place. The thin sheet of metal floated back, revealing the coils of cables and circuit boards.

  Conduits in abundance toward the back -- thick sailing ropes of insulated cables -- containing power lines for the actuators. Cutting those should pin the antenna in place. The backups could be brought online in due time.

  Piotr would have to scramble to find them but by then, it would be too late. Leo would not be silenced any longer.

  Leo reached in, pulling the cables out into the open. This was by design -- astronauts would need to pull their projects free of the housing in order to work with their clunky suits. Once free, Leo could do his damage with accuracy and speed.

  He snagged the floating cover panel from overhead and laid its blunt edge against the conduit, steel against rubber insulation. Hardly as proper as a blade, but suitable pressure would cut the wiring like a soft cheese left to warm in the summer air.

  And Leo found he could apply quite a bit more than he thought possible. The insulation gave way, and a kick went through his chest, as the voltage decided that he was now the best pathway for half a million angry electrons.

  His heart beat out a cacophony in his chest, trying to sound an alarm that had long since been unplugged. Maybe he had just never pushed himself before, really tried to find his limits.

  But logic told him his limits were about a half a mile behind him. This was more than any man should be able to do and survive.

  You’d be surprised what your body can do when you remove the governor, when you ignore the warnings of tearing muscle fibers. You can break down a door, lift a car, or cripple an interstellar spacecraft.

  All you have to do is unlock your potential.

  And just as suddenly as it began, the electric current cut off with the slicing of the line. The cables drifted apart, two halves of a whole that now hung like dead fish in acrid water.

  You have work to do.

  With the actuators disconnected, Leo turned his mind to the actual transmitter assembly. A simple coded burst would do just fine, flashes of a lantern on a foggy New England night.

  They’d see it, they’d know what to do. It might take them some time to decode the bizarre message, then longer still to get a salvage team out this far.

  But… they would have salvage teams at Gateway station, wouldn’t they?

  Don’t be stupid. Do you really think you’ll ever see it again, after all that’s happened?

  This won’t be a rescue mission. This is about the truth. You have to get the truth out there for someone to see. Every telescope in human hands is pointed toward Mars right now, but there will still be the official line, the story told from podiums to a skeptical public. And repeated enough times into microphones and pounded out in furious keystrokes, that lie will take root in fertile soil of hungry young minds.

  You have to tell the truth before they can tell theirs: that a mining accident took the lives of Mankind’s first interstellar colony. You have to tell them what happened down there, or they’ll never stop it.

  You have to tell them what was down there.

  It was only marginally more difficult than hooking up a car battery to the system. Striking the wires together to make a link was all he had to do, tapping intermittently to flash his tiny light amid the darkness.

  But now, it was just a matter of what to even say?

  He settled on a simple message, something he could crank out before Piotr cut power to the assembly. It would be out before anyone could silence him. No need for detail or coordinates, just an alarm bell, a signal flare.

  They’d know where to look now.

  Was anybody really going to come back out here after this?

  They have to. Or this thing will never stop. It is hungry, and It will never stop.

  With his message sent, Leo contemplated stuffing everything back inside the casing, but stopped. The only reason to do so would be for tidiness, to protect the wiring from cosmic interference or a barrage of physical matter.

  What did he care about that now? His best friend had damned him to starve in the trunk of a space cruiser. Let him wonder how to fix his telephone.

  His janitor had retired.

  He spun himself end over end, grabbing onto his handholds and pushing himself back toward the breached window he had climbed out of. The soft,
cool glow of the ion engines contrasted against the Red Planet overhead.

  He had been floating over this place for a few days now, but something about this view struck him as beautiful. Maybe it was the lack of space suit, the lack of filter or visor granting him a new kind of exposure, showing him the planet’s true form, like seeing a dancer strip off her clothes and lay bare her talents. It was both graceful and vulnerable, untouched by evil.

  No beastly corruption yet tainting its surface.

  Leo had seen that sight many times, but he felt crystals forming at the corners of his eyes, tears freezing to his skin. Why hadn’t his eyes frozen or his lungs collapsed? Was he delirious and imagining this all in his final moments before dying from exposure?

  No. You’re fine. You don’t need protection anymore.

  Why not? What had changed since this morning?

  Because I’m going to protect you. Protect us both.

  Leo closed the access hatch behind him, sealing off the compromised room and the bloating corpses. Rook’s blood had begun to freeze on the door frame, his viscera caught in a morbid state of matter, like necrotic gemstones.

  There was a perverse kind of beauty to it, perhaps brought on by its accompanying silence – a reverential tableau more commonly hidden by grave markers and tombstones. To take the sight in its whole felt disrespectful and gluttonous, the worst kind of sin, but to focus on the details, he could isolate out the most curious of beauty.

  Finally, Leo felt his heart race and his chest hurt. He had been exposed to the vacuum for quite a time, and it was alarming these symptoms hadn’t shown already.

  The comfort of that burning sun had left him, and these fluorescent rail lights seemed downright clinical by comparison. It looked more like a narrow hospital corridor than a home. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak. Every muscle fiber screamed from toes to his head.

  How is it possible to hurt to be here more than in outer fucking space?

  With the breach locked off, Leo would have to open some source of air into the cabin. But it was just so odd that the air wasn’t cycling on its own.

  The Murci scrubbed and circulated the used air through a set of carbon filters and past O2-generating moss. It was an antiquated system, but cheap had been the rule of law. Had it finally broken down? Had the breach damaged the fans or frozen the moss?

  No, he could hear the system cranking but the nearby vents were quiet.

  Piotr. Clever boy. He had turned off the oxygen cycle, hoping to suffocate poor Leo Taggart.

  Maybe a physical block in the junction? Unfortunately, it was a good plan. Without the warmth of the sun to comfort him, Leo felt like he was positively drowning, wilting in the dark like a rose in winter.

  He had to find air, something warm, something that could numb this pounding migraine that crept through every inch of him.

  He heaved himself along the hallway. Several prefabs were short of the sealed bulkhead, and their air had not emptied during that unfortunate breach. It wouldn't be much, but it would be a lifeline, precious minutes.

  The closest prefab was a short flight away, maybe fifteen feet above him. If he could get there before this headache blinded him…

  He had been holding his breath for a solid ten minutes. Leo was no free diver. How he found the strength to do that, let alone survive exposure…

  You keep concerning yourself with that rather than the crisis before you.

  Of course he was. It was an impossible feat. Everything that follows is either a delusion or a successive impossibility.

  Maybe this was all a bad dream, and he was still in Doc Gamble’s medical bay sleeping through the shuttle drop, conjuring a nightmare that would justify his wild anxieties. It felt rational to be as afraid as he was when the situation shook out like this.

  A lucid dream. That’s what this was. It’s the only thing that made sense. If he went back outside, to that comforting sun, maybe all would be well again.

  Leo stopped himself at the access hatch, cranking the handle. The wind gently tossed his ponytail about, kissing his face with that crisp touch. It was musty, thin air, but he wasn’t going to complain about a literal breath of life.

  It was going to be a while before he could think straight. And he didn’t have much time. He had to repair the damage Piotr had done, or he wouldn’t last the next few hours.

  Chapter 16

  Manifest

  It was a plant. That was the secret of it all.

  It might have simply been out of pure luck, but Locklear had absent-mindedly collected the most crucial sample of all. Raines had spent nearly a year in that canyon, but others had followed in her stead and he had quite innocently retrieved an alien carcass.

  Or rather, he had shoved the thing in a backpack where it was then shattered into several pieces.

  Raines peered at the ‘sand dollar’ Locklear had collected. Damage to the specimen was extensive and biology was hardly her field. She would have handed the sample over to William – had the geologist survived – but as it was now, she was the only living scientist. The standing burden for anyone having post-graduate degrees and a passing infatuation with literature.

  So while the members of the human heavy lifting brigade wandered about in pursuit of steel chunks that they might mold together, Dr. Raines was left to her own devices. Locklear had tossed her the shards to keep her occupied, but was quite curious as to what insight she might offer.

  She hated the living sciences. The rules were always changing.

  While the Medical station lacked proper laboratory tools, there were a handful of casual diagnostic devices she might repurpose. After arranging the pieces like a jigsaw puzzle — as though she might so easily repair the damage —Raines set about studying the artifact.

  Size and dimensions could not be accurately measured, nor could its age – although her team had found no such fossil during their tenure, so she surmised it appeared after her capture.

  The real ticket came on visual examination. A magnifier once used for casual ocular exams allowed her a closer look at the etched surface –

  And shock of shocks, the piece of broken glass was still moving. On a cellular level maybe, but definitive movement under magnification.

  This thing was as alive as her leg was, the critical function long since removed, but she’d seen this pattern dozens of times before from primary school on through her undergraduate, as light processed into energy into chemical sugar –

  Chlorophyll. Or the alien equivalent.

  This alien critter was no animal. It was a plant. If there truly was a live one unleashed on the Murci, current data would imply it would seek out a host the way roots would the ground. It would drain its subjects just as it would control them, until it had no further use. Anyone under its thrall would exist on borrowed time.

  How much time? Days, weeks, impossible to say.

  Jazmin Reed had paused to eat rations under the guise of ‘keeping her company.’ Raines was more convinced they didn’t trust leaving her alone.

  A necessary precaution, if only for their sense of safety. A mindset undercut by Raines’ disturbing prognosis.

  “That’s fuckin’ terrifying,” Jaz blurted upon hearing Raines’ findings.

  “Elegantly put,” Raines drawled, engaging in conversation only so much as to be polite.

  She peeled back the bandage on her nonexistent kneecap, sticky and soaked black with blood. Her blood. It clung to her skin like the bandage was afraid to part with her.

  The mild sting of the tugging flesh was almost adorable when laid against her recent experiences. Raines could almost feel the toes she no longer had, and each one was screaming a sour note to a melancholy chorus. The feeling might’ve shocked her, but her entire metric had been recalibrated recently.

  Jazmin watched from her bench a few feet away, as Raines examined her wound. The woman was no soldier, her stomach in full uproar at the grotesque sight.

  “Do we have liquid skin?” Raines asked,
staring at the meaty nub that was the bottom of her femur.

  “I don’t know what Lock packed,” Jazmin grunted, trying to push a power bar back down her throat. Her gag reflex was in open revolt.

  “Look around for me,” Raines ordered. When Jazmin did nothing, she reiterated with more force, “We are in a medical bay. Would you please find me some liquid skin?”

  Jazmin nodded, and dug into the nearest drawer. She flung things about like the semi valuable materials were clothes in her duffel bag. This was less of coordinated search, and more about looking at anything else and appearing busy.

  Raines studied the poor woman. The flop sweat and twitchy movements weren’t caused by nausea alone.

  “What’s on your mind, soldier?”

  Jazmin slammed the drawer shut, and moved on to the next. “Not a soldier. Name’s Jazmin.”

  “Okay, Jazmin. What’s on your mind?” Repeating the question might not result in an answer, but it would derive interesting results nonetheless.

  The frustrated and queasy policewoman took a deep breath, blocking her natural urge to engage. “My sister had a prosthesis. Few years and they’ll be able to graft your leg right back on. Like you never lost it.”

  “I broke my toes several times as a child,” Raines said, “New leg won’t predict the weather quite the same as the old one.”

  “Yeah, that’s why we got television.”

  “I don’t like someone telling me something I can find out for myself,” Raines quipped, a line she’d used on professors and students alike. How would Jazmin respond?

  Jazmin closed another drawer, pausing at a set of cupboards as she processed that statement. “What’s that’s supposed to mean?”

  Inquisitive, but her comprehension was minimal. Raines smirked, “It means my foot knew more than the weatherman did.”

  Jazmin smirked, pulling open the cabinet in front of her to reveal a bottle of the requisite goo. “Voila.”

  She tossed it to Raines, who squeezed a glop into one hand. Hesitation and delay would only increase her distress. And so she slapped the gunk directly onto her stump. It stung like she was rubbing salt and gravel against it.